You invest a lot of time and money into your marketing activities to increase awareness of your business, support your prospecting efforts, and help fill your pipeline.

You work hard to create a strong message and posts for social media, write blogs, send out emails, write press releases, and spend what seems like endless money on advertising. And what does your team do with all this content?

Nothing? Crickets? 

If this sounds frustratingly familiar, you need to change something. And that something is likely you, the leader.

Everyone does as the leader does and if the leader doesn’t make marketing a priority, no one else does either.

The intent of marketing is to support sales in filling the pipeline. If a full pipeline is a priority for your insurance or benefits agency, then marketing and engagement from your team should be a priority.

Think about your approach to team engagement from two angles: strategic and tactical.

A strategic approach to team engagement

  • Leaders must participate. Everyone does as the leader does, so if the leader is engaged and active with marketing – creating content and engaging on social media – the rest of the team is more likely to do so as well. It’s not guaranteed, but much more likely.
  • Talk about the WHY with the team. Why are you participating in marketing? What does it do for the organization? How does team engagement help the company? How does helping the company help the individuals? Make it directly relevant to the team roles and their personal opportunities.
  • Set expectations for team participation. Should team members be expected to participate? All or just some? Should they be contributing content? Or engaging with posts? Set the standard you want everyone to meet.
  • Be consistent. Marketing is not a project. Just like sales, accounting, or leadership, it’s an ongoing activity that must get regular attention. Create a set of activities your agency will commit to doing and put someone in charge of making it happen.

A tactical approach to team engagement

  • Have a marketing champion. Designate someone on your team who internally promotes the marketing activities. Or you may want a team of champions from different disciplines.
  • Communicate about the activities. Share what is happening with your team through Slack or Teams. Use the “Promote to Employees” button on your LinkedIn company page.
  • Subscribe employees to your blog. Your team should be reading your content and engaging with it, and sharing it with clients and prospects as appropriate.
  • Add employees to your emails. Be sure everyone on your team receives the same communications as your prospects and clients. Don’t leave them blind to what the company is doing. That’s an uncomfortable conversation when a client or prospect references one of your marketing pieces that you know nothing about. 😬

Start slow and stay steady

If you haven’t been engaging in marketing activities as an organization, it may be tempting to run out and create a flurry of activity to make up for the lack. But don’t.

Getting a wild hair or moving into panic mode with random commotion does not make a good marketing presence. Wild-hair activity does not build trust with your audience OR your team.

You build trust with a consistent, quality presence.

  • Engage daily on LinkedIn. All client-facing team members should have a presence.
  • Post interesting-to-your-audience information two/three times a week. Assign to one person (or rotate weekly) to manage this with found content. Expect team members to like, comment, share the content.
  • Send out a monthly email with useful content. Assign a couple of people to pull content from your third-party content sources into a marketing email. Include Q&A of the top questions your account managers are receiving.
  • Invite clients and prospects to quarterly webinars. Organize your own webinars or invite clients to third-party sessions. Producers and account managers invite people with one-to-one calls and emails as a follow-up to a marketing email.

These are a few manageable examples to get started, although there are many things you can do for marketing activities. And many ways you can get your team engaged. It just all comes down to priority.

  • How badly do you want a strong, robust presence with your audience?
  • How much do you want to show off your bench strength?
  • How much do you want to boost your pipeline filling opportunities?

If these ideas speak to you, focus on 1) setting a marketing plan and 2) engaging your whole team in creating or promoting. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be.

 

Content provided by Q4intelligence and partners

Photo by macgyverhh.